BRIAN KENNY: The expression “nothing succeeds like success” is attributed to French playwright and author Alexander Dumas, who struggled for years before breaking through with back-to-back hits The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. Described as a larger-than-life character, Dumas was a central figure in French literary circles and high society. English playwright Watts Phillips said of Dumas, “His tongue was like a windmill; once set in motion, he would never know when he would stop, especially if the theme was himself.”
Which brings us to the protagonist of today’s case, Deion Lewin Sanders—AKA “Primetime.” Sensational professional athlete, savvy brand manager, brash sports commentator, and controversial coach who is succeeding on the sidelines the way he did on the field of play. And did I mention that he likes to talk? Coach Prime’s media sessions have been likened to Sunday sermons where he talks more about discipline and character than wins and losses, but if winning is the best measure of success his approach seems to be working. Today on Cold Call we welcome Professor Hise Gibson to discuss his case, “Deion Sanders, The Prime Effect.” I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’re listening to Cold Call on the HBR Podcast Network.
HISE GIBSON is a senior lecturer whose research focuses on topics related to innovation and technology, operations management, human capital development, inclusive leadership, and leading organizations through crisis, which is perfectly appropriate for today’s conversation. Hise, welcome back.
HISE GIBSON: Oh, thanks a lot. I really appreciate it.
BRIAN KENNY: I feel like we just had you on the show not long ago, but that was a fun one. We did one on Uncle Nearest bourbon for those of you who want to go back in the catalog and seek that one out. That was a great conversation. Today’s is totally different, we’re going to be talking about somebody that most people know, Primetime Sanders, Coach Prime. He’s been a figure in the American sports scene for decades at this point, and he is having a bit of a resurgence if you’re paying attention. He has moved from the commentator’s booth to the sidelines where he’s coaching this year of last couple of years at University of Colorado, and before that at Jackson State, and we’re going to talk about all of that.
I really enjoyed reading the case, and one of his players, Travis Hunter, won the Heisman Trophy Award, that’s an amazing achievement. The biggest award in college sports and Coach Prime was there.
HISE GIBSON: He definitely was there and an amazing achievement by not only an amazing athlete, but a really good person, and so that’s something I think we see all the marvels of performance on the field, but Travis Hunter’s also an academic All American.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, it is, and we’re going to talk about that character, and discipline and all the things that coach Deion is preaching to his players, and he’s going about things in a way that not everybody agrees with, so there’s some controversy here too. Like any good HBS case, there’s some tension there so why don’t we get started. I’m going to ask you by telling me what motivated you to write the case about Deion Sanders and his transition to the University of Colorado.
HISE GIBSON: I think what motivated me to write the case was, 1, having been a football player myself and only a few years behind Coach Prime, I’ve been watching him my entire life, and just so happened around the time that I was thinking about this is when coach Prime was at Jackson State, and fortunately I have a younger brother who also played football in college at a historically Black college who’s also a NCA referee, and so he and I were, have been talking over years about, “Hey, you should really do a case on, you should really think about.” And I’m thinking, that will be really cool. I don’t know this person. And it just lucked up that way, and so it really allowed us to really think about can what he did at a historically Black college, work in a Power 5? At the time of meeting him we didn’t know. We had no idea, and it was really like pulling this all together real time, so it was an amazing opportunity to see something at the very beginning.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. How do you start the case in class? What’s your cold call?
HISE GIBSON: My cold call is, is he a transformational leader first? And so it really depends on how you think about transformational, and it really starts to pull at an idea on, well, is he just a coach, is he just a marketing person. For US-based audiences, it’s more of how they feel about what they’ve seen on TV. For international audiences, you’d be surprised at how many people outside the US actually know who he is. I’ve been very pleasantly surprised, although you still need to explain a lot about football, the US variant. But as far as the person, he’s well known globally.
Well, he’s done a great job managing the Prime brand, that’s part of the story here too, and it’s a much better story that he’s having the success he is at Colorado State than it would’ve been otherwise, so we’ll talk about that too. Can you tell us a little bit about his upbringing, his past, like who his influences were?
HISE GIBSON: It’s interesting. He grew up in Florida and I think with a mother who worked amazingly hard, his stepfather who was kind of one of those figures in the house that he saw go to work, so watching someone go to work every day. But then there was a separate coach who kind of pulled him under his wing early, and so it’s one of these interesting stories of someone saw something in him separately, and really invested in him early, and then he allowed his athleticism to take him through, so there was a pivotal moment early in his life where he looked at his mother and said to her, “I’m going to be rich and you will never have to work again.” Almost like a declaration. That this is what I’m going to do, I’m going to put it on my back and do it.
If we think about it, at the time, athletics, if you’re in a socioeconomic status that is a little bit lower, athletics has always been a way to get out, to break away, and he was narrowly focused at figuring out how to do that, and fortunately at Florida State was able to play multiple sports and excel at all of them. But I think that is where he started to really understand marketing without knowing what marketing was. Here’s an example, in the late 80s who was getting paid the most in football by position? Still quarterbacks and running backs, no one cared about defensive backs at all. Which means, how do I create a persona that people want, that’s unpredictable and that’s cool, and if we even unpack it more, back in the 1900s we didn’t have the internet. You had the paper and the news, so what’s going to be on the 6 o’clock and 10 o’clock news? That’s kind of how he was able to figure out and create a persona that became Primetime. Which was masterful and has evolved over the last 30, 40 years.
I was surprised to read that in the case. because he says, he says, “This is not me. What you’re seeing is a character that I’ve created, and people who know me know that that’s not what I act like on a day-to-day basis.” But that’s all we’ve ever seen of him, so it’s hard to wrap your brain around that.
What’s interesting is that when you actually are in the space around him–regular guy, engaged, thoughtful, deeply thoughtful, and really understands people and listens, so again, based on what we see on TV, the individual who runs an organization are two very different things, and I really think that individuals who are listening to him talk aren’t actually listening, because he’s telling you who he is every time there’s a mic in front of him. You just have to get over your persona, what you think he is or how you feel from the 49ers or the Atlanta Falcons or the Cincinnati Reds, and realize this is a person who is not only himself a winner, but is able to influence others and bring them up in ways they wouldn’t think they could.
BRIAN KENNY: He is not afraid to do it differently than others have done it. I want to talk about his time at Jackson State because he came into a pretty disastrous situation there from a football perspective. Can you describe what he was able to do there?
Well, when we think about Jackson State, a historically Black college that has produced amazing athletes, amazing scholars, who have impacted the US and that region of the US…Walter Peyton came through Jackson State, and so it used to be an amazing program that had just fallen on tough times. And so when we think about coaches, what would cause a place like Jackson State to hire someone who has never coached college football? Well, there’s something about marketing and persona that maybe we bring this person here, not only can he help the program, but maybe drive revenue in other ways that helps the university.
That’s the idea. Now, when we consider that Jackson State at the time did not have the same facilities that Mississippi State has. There’s a water crisis in Jackson. There’s not enough good housing in Jackson for students, so he is dealing with a lot of barriers, and funding and resourcing which means as the coach, he invested his salary into the program. That’s unusual.
Yes. It is.
Created a practice field. They were practicing at a high school before he showed up. Creating a football player space to operate, adjust the food. There’s a lot of things he individually did to bring the program up, and folks would assume, well, he doesn’t know how to coach football, but they discount he’s actually been coaching for 20 years. He’s been coaching his kids and others for a while. When he was a commentator, he was leaving being a commentator to go coach his kids. Now that doesn’t mean every AAU coach can go and coach college or in the pros, but maybe if you’re a Hall of Famer you might know something about technique, and coaching, and I think there’s a lot of osmosis that coach Prime has had that is not acknowledged.
He learned sports by playing football and baseball at the same time. The way football players operate and baseball players operate are drastically different, but he got to know the owners, and the GMs (general managers) and start to understand how organizations run.
It sounds like he was studying. Like everywhere he was, he was studying what was happening around him.
And as he’s at Jackson State transitioning that program, he’s actually impacting the region. So for example, in 2022, the revenue for home games, four home games brought in $16.2 million. That’s up from 7.2 the year before. For the SWAC championship game that year, that one game brought in $8 million, so he brought in about I think it’s estimated $185 million to the region.
That’s crazy.
Just by his presence, the ecosystem for the football team, for a handful of games brought in that much to North Mississippi.
None of that happens if he’s not winning, if the team’s not winning on the field.
If the team’s not winning, and also if he’s not able to bring in players but he’s able to bring in players because he’s improved the facilities. He’s able to partner with airlines, partner with Under Armour, he’s leveraging his relationship capital that’s going to benefit his players, which then allows him to win, which then benefits the school, so all of it kind of bleeds together—which means when he picks up and moves from Jackson, Mississippi and lands in Boulder, Colorado at the University of Colorado. That’s the part at the time of the case where like you’re going from a majority minority city, to a city with less than 1% folks who identify as Black, and a socioeconomic status is drastically different. Can he be successful?
In reading the case I was thinking, really the only similarity between the 2 roles was that both teams were terrible when he got there, but in Colorado you’ve got probably a completely different mindset. They’ve got much nicer facilities; they’re recruiting from probably other parts of the country where they’re better off. Are they going to be as open to the way he’s doing things? And it seems like initially the answer is no. Can you talk about that?
I think that initially the answer is no, because he’s about to be do something so different, and he’s also making history. He’s the first African American coach of a historically Black college football team to go to a power 5 school. There have been other coaches from historically Black colleges, universities to go from HBCUs to a power five or to a majority school, but both of those coaches were white coaches. So he’s the first African American to ever do that, and so he recognizes that he might have to win differently, because there’s a different kind of scrutiny that’s going to be placed on him in this environment. That’s one. Two—you’re right. No facilities issues. None of those kinds of structural challenges, but it’s expensive, and as someone who grew up in Texas, I remember when the Colorado Buffs were amazing when I was in high school, and they had got great players out of Texas and out of Louisiana and out of Florida and out of California. They haven’t been able to do that in a while. And how are you going to bring these people from Florida and Texas to Colorado? He quickly realizes, well, I don’t have facility problems, but I might have some food issues. I might need to figure out a way to ensure that the housing is affordable, and I’m bringing players up here who’ve never seen snow. So there are other nuances that are not as structural, but still need to be attended to in order to entice players to come in, and we also need to consider the transfer portal and all of a sudden name, image, and likeness (NIL). Which now causes him to be even more successful because he understands the business of sports, and that’s what the NIL and the transfer portal has created. As a coach now you have to understand the business, and that’s another part of I think Coach Prime, that was discounted by many others, but that has caused many of the most “winningest” coaches in college football to depart.
Right, and we should talk a little bit about the portal. I don’t want to go down a rabbit hole on it, but it factors heavily into this because it’s what allowed him to turn over 80% of the team, which is just a mind-blowing number. He’s basically creating an entirely new team and coaching staff. The portal, the rule changed the year that he came to Colorado, and let me see if I get this right. It allows a player to go in and state that they are open to offers from other schools. Is that oversimplifying it?
That’s not oversimplifying, that’s exactly true. Prior to the portal opening, what would occur is that players could say, “I’m leaving.” But they have to be approved by the AD (athletic director), and their AD could not approve it, which means the players eating up eligibility.
Right, the athletic director at the school. Yeah.
Whereas coaches can move about the world with no issues, players couldn’t. Now with the portal players can up and leave, which means they don’t take up a space on a roster, so once you say you’re gone, you’re gone, you’ve now opened a space for scholarship.
That’s for scholarship, right?
For someone else.
Right, and so coach Prime comes in and he says, “This is how I’m going to run this program.” And I want you to describe what that is in a second. “If you don’t like how I’m going to do it, then you should use the portal. Jump on that portal, let people know that you’re available because I don’t want you here if you don’t want to be here.”
Yeah, and I think it’s also about what is not understood is that people believe that they just kick people off the team. That’s actually not what happened. You have to now compete, and when you come into in an environment where you have a team that was just 1 in 11, one win 11 losses, and they’re the worst team in college football, do you really have a lot of folks on that team that want to compete? Possibly not. Which meant that they elected to leave, which created space for Coach Prime and his staff to pull in a whole bunch of amazing players to come under his system.
What were some of the things that he asked of his players? What was his approach?
Well, I think a lot of his approach, which is also something that motivated me to do the case, he has what I would call an old school coaching style on new school players. And when I say old school coaching style, to unpack it: for US football coaches in the 90s, a lot of those football coaches were actually products of the Vietnam era. They were in the military, they were coaches. They had fathers and grandparents who were in World War II and Korea, and they were a negative reinforcement kind of coaching style, and they would be physical when necessary to motivate in a certain way to get things done. Now that’s not happening, the physical part, but holding kids accountable is also part of that old school way of operating.
Understanding you’re a great athlete, but those stars don’t matter when you come to a football program, meaning the rating scale, and so he holds kids accountable and he expects them to follow his core values of being smart, tough, disciplined. And the character piece is really important because they’re operating in college, and because we have the internet and anything they do becomes a viral moment. They have to be able to comport themselves in a way that doesn’t embarrass them, the university, and the program. That’s a lot to put on a kid who has been amazing his entire life, and now has put on a team with other amazing athletes.
